Ask A Genius 1568: Trump, Transparency, and AI Regulation
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/20
How do Donald Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and his push for lighter, federally standardized AI regulation together reveal the deeper risks of elite impunity, technological power, and democratic backsliding in the United States?
In this conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner examine Donald Trump’s declining approval ratings, his controversial behavior, and the political consequences of the newly passed Epstein Files Transparency Act. Rosnerdiscusses the scale of the Epstein documents, the bipartisan push for disclosure, and why Republicans breaking with Trump signals shifting political winds ahead of the midterms. The discussion then moves to AI regulation, where Jacobsen and Rosner explore whether a unified federal standard could guide rapidly evolving technologies. They outline the need for specialized oversight, ethical benchmarks, and possibly an entire Department of Emerging Technology to manage future risks.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You probably have some thoughts about Trump. Any thoughts now?
Rick Rosner: I do not think things are over for him politically, but there is clearly more national exasperation with him now than before. His approval rating is hovering in the low forties in most polling averages, with some recent surveys dropping him into the high thirties — the lowest point of his second term so far. He began the term at about 47 percent approval in January, so he has fallen by roughly five to ten points, depending on the polling series.
He is also being a dick. He just hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House. U.S. intelligence publicly assessed in 2021 that bin Salman approved the 2018 operation in Istanbul in which a Saudi team killed and dismembered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, even though the Saudi government still denies that he ordered it. When Trump was asked about Khashoggi in front of the crown prince during this recent visit, he again downplayed the killing, contradicting the U.S. intelligence assessment and suggesting that “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman” and that “things happen,” framing the murder as something that should not derail the U.S.–Saudi relationship.
On Air Force One, when Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey pressed him about the Epstein files and the newly released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls,” Trump cut her off and snapped, “Quiet, piggy.” That kind of incident rarely shifts voter sentiment on its own, but these episodes accumulate, and his approval has been sliding more sharply in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, Congress has forced the issue on the Epstein records. The House passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 18 by a vote of 427–1, and the Senate passed it unanimously on November 19. There was exactly one “no” vote in all of Congress. The law requires the Justice Department to make publicly available — in a searchable, downloadable format — essentially all unclassified, non–grand-jury files related to the Epstein investigation within 30 days. It also requires the Department to provide the House and Senate Judiciary Committees with an unredacted list of all government officials and other politically exposed individuals named in the files. Because support in both chambers far exceeds the two-thirds threshold, Congress could easily override a veto.
We already know the scale of the material. The government holds approximately 100,000 pages of Epstein-related documents that are not protected by grand-jury secrecy rules, in addition to more than 30,000 pages the House Oversight Committee released earlier this year. After pressure regarding three explosive emails that explicitly reference Trump — including one in which Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls” — Republicans on the Oversight Committee released an additional 20,000 pages of documents from the Epstein estate.
None of the estate emails are to or from Trump or his staff, but he is referenced more than a thousand times. One analysis found him mentioned in roughly three-quarters of all email threads in that cache, with Epstein often mocking him and describing him as “dirty” and “borderline insane.”
Because these records have already been reviewed by multiple entities — the Justice Department, the FBI, and congressional committees — large-scale scrubbing to remove names would be difficult without obvious discrepancies emerging. The administration can still attempt redaction, citing confidentiality or victim protection, but the new law sharply limits redaction authority and explicitly requires unredacted name lists for Congress.
So where does that leave Trump? His approval is slipping. Congress — including nearly all Republicans — just broke with him on a major transparency vote. In the released estate documents, his name appears frequently, mostly in Epstein’s commentary rather than in communications involving Trump himself. I do not know how much concrete damage the next 30 days of disclosures will cause him, but the willingness of Republicans to defy him so decisively, sensing a shift in political winds, does not bode well heading into the midterms, which are roughly 350 days away.
Jacobsen: There was one document I saw. One reasonable thing did come out of Trump recently. He argued that the United States should not have excessive regulation on artificial intelligence. That part is not interesting—many people have made that claim, and many disagree. The interesting part, which I think is actually reasonable, is the idea of having one federal standard. Essentially, you universalize the ethics and direction of AI development. Benchmarking. I think that part is reasonable.
Rosner: That seems reasonable once you define it. Maybe “standard” is not the right word, because AI is developing so rapidly that everyone needs to follow the same rules, but the rules will have to change month to month as we learn more about what AI can do and how companies will try to circumvent regulations. There should be a federal agency staffed by dozens—probably hundreds—of competent people to oversee the whole thing. Almost like an FBI specifically for AI. Hundreds may not even be enough; you may need a thousand or more people monitoring the landscape hour by hour, updating the public month to month, and developing guidelines as things evolve.
Jacobsen: Yes. It is not going to be one thing. How AI is defined and used will differ across contexts. You could create a benchmark of guidelines—maybe categorical. A universal standardization with three categories people already reference: systems below human intelligence, which would be highly specialized; systems at human intelligence, which would require their own ethical guidelines; and superintelligent systems, where the strictest coding standards would apply so they remain tightly aligned with human values.
Rosner: You can have philosophical principles outlining what we are trying to achieve—for example, that AI should not be a threat to human existence. That is a base-level standard. After that, the diversity of applications is enormous. Medical AI. Self-driving cars. Defense systems. Language models people chat with. Personality models that mimic relationships. If you spent two hours listing areas that should be monitored, you could probably name fifty—areas where AI may be beneficial but also genuinely dangerous.
It is difficult because there are so many domains. AI in appliances is another area, although the dangers there are more far-fetched. AI is not going to make your toaster kill you, and a refrigerator with embedded AI is probably not going to manipulate people into unstable behavior. But who knows?
There are multiple areas where oversight is essential. It needs an entire government department. Whether that happens under Trump or the next president, I do not know. And it probably needs to be broader—a full Department of Emerging Technology dedicated to monitoring new developments across the entire technological landscape.
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